Greetings and salutations, fellow Fridge Nukers! Bradfield here, reporting from a corner booth at the back of the Cantina in beautiful downtown Mos Eisley!

Unless you’ve been preoccupied Womprat hunting in the back forty of your moisture farm, you are most likely aware that the Granddaddy of all Star Wars fan conventions, Star Wars Celebration, will be at the Anaheim Convention Center this April. In the event that there might be some uninformed parties out there, tickets are still available at the Star Wars Celebration website. In the months preceding JJ Abrams’ Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, certainly WonderCon and Comic-Con will be heavy on Star Wars information. Still, while not an event officially sanctioned (but tacitly encouraged) by Lucasfilm — or even [at this point] parent company, Disney — fans of the goings on “A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” are likely to walk away from the last weekend in April not only with valuable information, but with huge fanboy/fangirl smiles on their faces.

As with any high-profile gathering of the geeks, precious little information is known about the official roster, and the “big guns” will most likely not be revealed until much closer to Opening Day. However, event organizers released a couple of “opening salvos” over the holiday season regarding early additions to the line-up – and all this reporter can say is that if these are preliminary, relatively low-level announcements (around five months beforehand), Star Wars Celebration 2015 is going to get sick.

Star Wars: Rebels – “Fan Soup” for even the most hardened of souls

The Hardest Working Crew in Show Biz

First and foremost…

The Season Two premiere of Disney XD‘s animated hit, Star Wars: Rebels[SWR], will be screened during SWC. And if that isn’t enough…

Like any proud parent, the cast and crew of Disney XD’s animated hit SWR were hitting the road, “showing off their baby,” as early as last year’s WonderCon. So naturally, cast members Freddie Prinze Jr. (Kanan), Vanessa Marshall (Hera), Steve Blum (Zeb), Taylor Gray (Ezra), and Tiya Sircar (Sabine), will be on hand, as will Executive Producer — and the man who brought us Cartoon Network’s The Clone Wars — Dave Filoni. “Other guests,” have been teased, and while it’s not a guarantee of an appearance, guest voices on the series so far include Anthony Daniels and James Earl Jones. [Astro-mech droid, Chopper, remains unconfirmed.]

Rancho Obi-Wan curator Steve Sansweet’s collection has all of ours, collectively, beat by a mile

Help Me, Obi-Wan

Regular contributor to Star Wars fanzine, Star Wars Insiderand curator of the largest collection of Star Wars memorabilia on planet Earth, Steve Sansweet will be bring treasures from his officially sanctioned memorabilia museum, Rancho Obi-Wan(conveniently located in beautiful, scenic Petaluma, California) to the Anaheim event. So if you’ve been missing your Hoth playsets, would like to revisit the C3-P0’s cereal (well, the box), or would just like to see some action figures that only have five points of articulation, probably in the box, DO NOT leave the Anaheim Convention Center without at least taking a quick swing by the Rancho Obi-Wan exhibit.

I’ll also go out on a limb and say that Sansweet’s “road show” will be a small part of a larger memorabilia/props/costumes exhibit. The Convention Center has the space.

A trailer for Star Wars Celebration is below. In the meantime, check back with Nuke the Fridge, early and often for all your Star Wars information needs.

[Sources: StarWarsCelebration.com, StarWars.com, panels at WonderCon 2014 and San Diego Comic-Con International 2014. Photos by Carlos Duncan. All other images property of Disney/Lucasfilm.]